You Know When the Men Are Gone (2 page)

Meg pulled her hand free and glanced back at the children hiding in the shadow of the door. “It’s nice to meet you, too, Natalya,” she said as calmly as possible, her stomach throbbing from Boris’s impact. She left the junk mail on the floor and hurried back to her apartment.

When the fridge was empty except for two cans of Diet Coke and a depleted bag of baby carrots, Meg drove out to the Warrior Way Commissary. She hated grocery shopping, she hated cooking without a man to satiate; the only pleasure in her trip was picking out the food she would send Jeremy in a weekly package—beef jerky, Twizzlers and lollipops, hand wipes and magazines, things that could get crushed, exposed to high temperatures, sit in a box for over a month, and still manage to be consumed by home-desperate soldiers.

She walked the meat aisle, passing her husband’s favorites: baby back ribs, pork chops, bacon-wrapped filet mignons. She reached out, touching the cold, bloody meat through the plastic. The raw flesh both horrified and mesmerized, and she wondered if a human being would look the same if packaged by a butcher, the striations of fat, the white bone protruding, the blood thin like water in the folds of the wrap. She wondered if wounds looked like this, purple and livid, but with shrapnel sticking out, dust clinging to the edges, blood in the sand. She quickly put the packaged beef down, telling herself that she would not think such things after Jeremy was home.

But tonight she would get a frozen dinner. A vegetarian one.

As she turned down the next aisle, she noticed a woman rocking her cart back and forth with two children inside. Meg squinted; only one person could have a coat like that.

“Natalya?” she called out.

Natalya stared at her without the faintest recognition, still pushing the cart back and forth as if she were rocking babies. She looked up at the shelves and said softly, “There is so much, I cannot ever decide.”

Meg glanced at Natalya’s cart. It was full of potatoes and onions and cabbage. “Are these favorites from your home country?” But Natalya did not nod or even seem to understand. Meg played with her wedding ring and spoke slower. “What do you like to cook?”

Natalya picked up a box of Uncle Ben’s rice. “I am not good cook. My mother killed when I was girl. No one teach me.”

Meg swallowed her grin and stood absolutely still, all words erased from her mind. “Rice is easy,” she finally whispered. “And I could teach you how to cook.”

“Yes, rice. With flavor. My English reading is very bad. I do not understand but maybe some have pictures?”

Meg began to look at the boxes of instant rice, handing Spicy Jambalaya and Roasted Chicken to the little boy, who began to shake a box wildly in each fist.

Natalya put one of her long-fingered hands on Meg’s wrist and asked abruptly, “May I borrow money?”

Meg stared. This was taboo. If a wife was in need there were rules; you were supposed to call the rear detachment commander and he could approve an official Army Emergency Relief loan. Or, if you didn’t want your husband or his command to find out, there were the shifty money shops on Rancier Avenue that let you borrow, at interest, until the next paycheck came through.

“Please,” Natalya continued, smiling harder, her lipstick cracking a bit at the sides of her mouth. “Please. Only forty dollars. Very urgency.”

Meg looked around to see if she recognized anyone in the aisle, and then, flustered, reached into her purse, pulling out three twenties.

Natalya counted quickly, her cheeks softening at the extra bill.

“Soon I repay, yes?” she said, and immediately pushed her cart away, the boy still shaking the rice. Meg took a deep breath, watching that coat turn a corner and disappear.

Meg looked for Natalya at the Family Readiness Group meeting the following week, the omnipotent “FRG” with its updates from the front, dispelling the fear invoked by CNN with facts and names, always offering ambiguous but hopeful news of return. The FRG Meg belonged to represented 1-7 Cav, an infantry battalion that was exclusively made up of men, which meant that the spouses were all wives. When the husbands were away, the women met regularly and were the closest thing Meg had to a family. It was the closest thing any of them had to family, this simulacrum of friendship, women suddenly thrown together in a time of duress, with no one to depend on but each other, all of them bereft and left behind in this dry expanse of central Texas, walled in by strip malls, chain restaurants, and highways that led to better places. Most of them had gotten used to making a life for themselves without a husband, finding doctors and dentists and playgrounds, filling their cell phone with numbers and their calendars with playdates, and then the husbands would return and the army would toss them all at some other base in the middle of nowhere to begin again.

The wives in Meg’s FRG depended on each other for babysitting, barbecue cookouts, pep talks. They brought casseroles when a woman returned to a husbandless house with a newborn, and they remembered each other’s birthdays when the men overseas did not. They lived close together on base and they minded each other’s business. In a world where it is normal for a thousand men to pack their bags, meet on a parade field, and then disappear for an entire year, the women of deployed soldiers stuck together. Mingling too often with the civilian world, so full of couples, of men nonchalantly paying bills, planning vacations, and picking kids up after ball games, those constant reminders of what life could be, would drive an army spouse crazy.

The FRG leader, Bonnie McCormick, looked every bit the battalion commander’s wife: smooth, shoulder-length hair, very little makeup but a perfectly lipsticked smile, conservative blouse with khaki capris, a body that could keep up with the men during their early morning runs.

“Ladies, it is important that you get this information out to the wives who aren’t here,” Bonnie said, looking around the room. Some wives nodded; most waited to see what was coming next. “You know who they are.” She opened the notebook on her lap and began talking about potential return dates for the men, just two months out, and Meg quickly started writing it all down.

Carla leaned into Meg’s shoulder and asked, “Did you meet Natalya Torres yet?” Meg nodded, keeping her eyes on Bonnie McCormick. Carla, raising her whispered voice ever so slightly so the wives around them could listen in, continued. “Well, I finally saw her in the laundry room and told her about this meeting but she just shrugged. Her husband’s been gone ten months and she hasn’t been to one meeting yet.” Meg felt something hit her in the neck and looked at Carla’s drooling baby, who was waving around a one-pound dumbbell.

“Isn’t Mimi strong?” Carla asked, immediately thrusting the baby at Meg. “Whenever I try to take it away she screams bloody murder.” Meg would have liked to say, “Please get that Churchill-headed creature away from me,” but of course she just took Mimi and jiggled her and made the noises adults make when babies drool all over them. The wives were always throwing their offspring at her as if they thought that the more she got spit up on, the more she’d want one of her own.

“So Sandy from 5C? Her husband used to work with Natalya’s in the Green Zone?” Carla spoke with the wonder of an archaeologist newly returned from discovering the eighth ancient wonder of the world. “She told me all sorts of wild things.” Meg let Mimi’s wet and sticky hand tug on her ear and she gave up trying to take notes. Listening to Carla, she learned that Natalya was Serbian, that she met her husband five years ago when he was stationed in Kosovo and she was cutting hair at his base. He’d been married at the time but quickly divorced the wife who waited patiently for him at home. He brought his new, non-English-speaking bride back to the States when his tour was up.

Bonnie sent a steely glance at the whispering women and they immediately stopped, Meg’s cheeks burning as if a priest had caught her giggling during Mass. She didn’t reveal that Natalya’s mother had been killed when she was young, nor did she mention that she had loaned Natalya money. Keeping secrets made her feel as if she was betraying the wives and she felt sweaty and flushed in the room of women. But Carla, not noticing Meg’s discomfort, kept talking, her unearthed treasures would not be silenced. As soon as Bonnie started discussing the different places they could reserve for a welcome home party, Carla told Meg about Natalya’s twins, Peter and Lara, three and a half years old. They didn’t speak any English, Peter still wore a diaper, and the woman who lived directly above them said sometimes they cried the entire night through. Another wife Meg had never spoken to before tapped her on the shoulder and added that Natalya had already used the “My husband would break his heart if Boris gone” and “Please promise refrain from military police” lines on every single inhabitant in the three-floor apartment building. But for all of their complaining about Boris’s apocalyptic bark, none of the wives had contacted the MPs. None of them were willing to make that call, although the reason was not Natalya, nor her twins. No, they would not be responsible for the grief her husband would feel when he came back, having survived the year in Iraq, to a home without a dog. They could not play a role in his disappointment and so they went without sleep, cursed under their breath, banged the ceiling or floor with brooms, and smacked their palms against frail drywall.

Each day it seemed as if Meg could hear Natalya more and more clearly.

The layout of their apartments mirrored each other exactly, so if Meg was reading in the guest bedroom, she could hear Natalya singing lullabies to her children in their room, usually one that sounded like “London Bridge,” but not in English, and all day long Meg’s head played the endless refrain,
London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady!
Or, watching TV, she’d hear the murmur of English language tapes from Natalya’s living room, the voices like a slow mockery of the dialogue of Meg’s Discovery Channel. In bed at night the springs of Natalya’s mattress would whine as she tossed and turned. Meg heard so much she began to imagine what Natalya might be cooking, the clothes she chose from her closet, which magazines she flipped through while her microwave popcorn popped. The children rarely made any noise, and when they did it was their singsong gibberish. Meg imagined them listening at their wall, mimicking her motions and laughing at her, and she would jump back and turn up the radio or open the fridge noisily so they wouldn’t think she was eavesdropping.

Once or twice a week, Natalya got a call at exactly eleven P.M. These were different from the random calls she got from her husband, when she spoke her slow English, punctuated with “What?” or “Hello? Hello? Are you there?” During her eleven-o’clock calls, she spoke Serbian very loudly, as if on long distance, and she always talked for a full hour. Meg started to look forward to these calls, letting the words lull her to sleep, a welcome distraction. The words were impenetrable and yet so close. She was sure Natalya was revealing her deepest secrets.